Cloud service providers (CSPs) in Malaysia will have to apply for a licence from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) starting from next year. The new policy was first announced by the Minister of Communications and Multimedia, Annuar Musa yesterday before followed by an advisory that was released earlier today by the regulator to the media and on its website.

In the advisory which was presented in the form of FAQ, MCMC defined cloud services as “any service made available to end-users on demand via the Internet from a cloud computing provider’s server,”. The move was taken to ensure CSPs can deliver a high level of data security, data privacy, data protection, and data flow to their customers, according to the regulator.

exabytes kl dc 01 — *Exabytes Kuala Lumpur Data Centre.*

In addition to that, the new regulation also aims to provide legal protection for consumers and public agencies. It will be put in place starting from 1 January 2022 and applies to local cloud service providers as well as international companies that maintain an official presence in Malaysia.

For international CSP that does not have a local presence but provide cloud services to end-users in Malaysia via a local data centre, the data centre will be the one that has to apply for the licence. The specific type of licence that all these CSPs and data centre operators have to obtain from MCMC, is the ASP (C) which belongs to the regulator’s Applications Service Providers class licence.

ntt cyberjaya 5 01 — *NTT Cyberjaya 5 Data Centre.*

Since the ASP (C) licence is valid for only one year, this means CSPs and data centre operators have to submit renewal applications on annual basis. However, this new policy does not apply to web hosting and client server services which have been exempted from the class licence requirement for the past 21 years through the Communications and Multimedia (Licensing) (Exemption) Order 2000.

(Source: MCMC, KKMM / Facebook. Images: MCMC, Exabytes, NTT)